As with other parts of the Obama speech, the reference to Muslims' scientific contributions has also become the subject of debate. A prominent critic of Obama's acknowledgment of Islamic contribution is Professor Frank Tipler of Tulane University, America's right-wing scientist and author of "The Physics of Christianity".
Tipler questions Obama's speech in an attempt to diminish the contribution of Muslims by calling them a "conduit" of knowledge from ancient Greeks and dismisses the idea of any Islamic contribution beyond that. The only exception he makes is for Dr. Abdus Salam of Pakistan. Here is how Tipler talks about Salam: "There was one truly great “Muslim” physicist, the Nobel Prize winning Pakistani, Mohammed Abdus Salam. I put “Muslim” in quotes, because Salam belonged to the Ahmadi sect of Islam, a sect that accepts modern science. But in 1974, the Pakistani parliament declared the Ahmadi sect heretical, and its members are currently being persecuted in Pakistan. Contemporary Muslim historians generally do not list Salam as an important Muslim scientist. Had he remained in Pakistan, he quite possibly would have been killed."
The assertion that Muslims or Pakistanis do not take pride in Dr. Salam is patently false. Dr. Pervez Hoodhoy, Chairman of the Physics Dept. at Islamabad University, regards Dr. Salam as his inspiration, as do many other Pakistani scientists.
The claim of Muslims as being mere "conduits" of knowledge has been rejected in "Lost Discoveries" by Dick Teresi. Says Teresi, "Clearly, the Arabs served as a conduit, but the math laid on the doorstep of Renaissance Europe cannot be attributed solely to ancient Greece. It incorporates the accomplishments of Sumer, Babylonia, Egypt, India, China and the far reaches of the Medieval Islamic world.
Tipler's claims are further exposed by Teresi by his description of the work done by Copernicus. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, a Persian Muslim astronomer and mathematician, developed at least one of Copernicus's theorems, now called The Tusi Couple, three hundred years before Copernicus. Copernicus used the theorem without offering any proof or giving credit to al-Tusi. This was pointed out by Kepler, who looked at Copernicus's work before he developed his own elliptical orbits idea.
A second theorem found in Copernican system, called Urdi lemma, was developed by another Muslim scientist Mu'ayyad al-Din al-Urdi, in 1250. Again, Copernicus neither offered proof nor gave credit to al-Urdi. Columbia University's George Saliba believes Copernicus didn't credit him because Muslims were not popular in 16th century Europe, not unlike the situation today.
Tipler completely ignores the great contribution of another giant of science from the Islamic world, Ibn Haitham (Alhazen), who developed the "Scientific Method". Alhazen is also considered the father of modern optics. The ancient Greeks thought our eyes emitted rays, like a laser, which enabled us to see. The first person to explain that light enters the eye, rather than leaving it, was Ibn al-Haitham. He invented the first pin-hole camera after noticing the way light came through a hole in window shutters. The smaller the hole, the better the picture, he worked out, and set up the first Camera Obscura (from the Arab word qamara for a dark or private room). He is also credited with being the first man to shift physics from a philosophical activity to an experimental one.
The fountain pen was invented for the Sultan of Egypt in 953 after he demanded a pen which would not stain his hands or clothes. It held ink in a reservoir and, as with modern pens, fed ink to the nib by a combination of gravity and capillary action.
The algebra as we know today came from the Muslim world. Al Khwarizmi wrote the first book on algebra. The term "algebra" was first used by him. Al Khwarizmi was born about 790 in Baghdad, Iraq, and died about 850.
The word for "Algebra" comes from the Arabic word for "al-jabr" which means "restoration of balance" in both sides of an equation. Algebra was based on previous work from Greeks, Alexandrians in Egypt, and Hindus who had preserved the work from ancient Egyptians and Babylonians.
In the ninth century, al-Khwarizmi wrote one of the first Arabic algebras with both proofs and examples. Because of his work, he is called "the Father of Algebra." Al-Khwarizmi was a Persian born in the eighth century. He converted (changed) Babylonian and Hindu numerals into a workable system that almost anyone could use. He gave the name to his math as "al-jabr" which we know as "algebra".
A Latin translation of al-Khwarizmi's book on algebra appeared in Europe in the 12th century. In the early 13th century the new algebra appeared in the writings of the famous Italian mathematician, Leonardo Fibonacci. So, algebra was brought into Europe from ancient Babylon, Egypt and India by the Arabs and then into Italy.
In his 1864 book "The History of the Intellectual Development of Europe", English-born American scientist J.W. Draper wrote that “I have to deplore the systematic manner in which the literature of Europe has contrived to put out of sight our scientific obligations to the Mohammedans. Surely they can not be much longer hidden. Injustice founded on religious rancor and national conceit cannot be perpetuated forever".
Tipler appears to part of the campaign to deny credit to Arabs, Persians or Muslim for their significant contributions to humanity. Clearly, he, and others like him, are not happy with Obama's outreach to Muslims. He is simply using the Obama speech to advance his agenda.
Here's a documentary on Islam narrated by Benazir Bhutto:
Here's a video of a BBC documentary about Al Andalusia or Muslim Spain:
Related Links:
Obama Speaks to the Muslim World
Lost Discoveries by Dick Teresi
Physics of Christianity by Frank Tipler
What is Not Taught in School
How Islamic Inventors Changed the World
Jinnah's Pakistan Booms Amidst Doom and Gloom
10 comments:
The assertion that Muslims or Pakistanis do not take pride in Dr. Salam is patently false.
No kidding. That's why Zia put up an official "Pakistani" candidate for a UN position against Dr Salam. Oh, and that he wasn't given a proper "Muslim" burial. Pakistan has chosen to identify with that intellectual and cultural wasteland called Saudi Arabia. We're seeing the glorious fruits of that association.
As for Barry Obama's eloquent words on "civilizational debt" there's one word to describe that: pandering. Droning on about seminal contributions 1000 years ago amounts to manufacturing the light at the end of the loooong tunnel.
In India Ahmedias are free to profess their version of Islam unlike in Pakistan.
Anyways I would like to bring to ur and other Pakistanis' notice about what Indian Muslims think about Obama's speech.
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20090605&fname=jason&sid=1
زندگی بے وفا کیوں ہوتی ہے
وفا کرنے کی سزا کیوں ہوتی ہے
چھوٹی سی بات پہ بہا دیتے ہیں خون
انسان میں اتنی اناء کیوں ہوتی ہے
کرتا ہوں میں جس سے باربار توبہ
الہی مجھ سے وہی خطا کیوں ہوتی ہے
بناتے تو ہیں ہم اپنے ہاتھوں سے مسجد
نماز اپنی ہی پھر قضاء کیوں ہوتی ہے
It is all illusion. Science tells us in all kinds of ways, there is no such thing as a solid object.
This doesn't avoid believing there are solid objects, however.
For practical reasons, see the video on the following site:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4232897377629019446
Here's an interesting quote from Robert Briffault, The Making of Humanity(1928) "
"It is highly probable that but for the Arabs, modern European civilization would have never assumed that character which has enabled it to transcend all previous phases of evolution. For although there is not a single aspect of human growth in which the decisive influence of Islamic culture is not traceable, nowhere is it so clear and momentous as in the genesis of that power which constitutes the paramount distinctive force of the modern world and the supreme course of its victory-natural sciences and the scientific spirit... What we call science arose in Europe as a result of a new spirit of inquiry; of new methods of investigation, of the method of experiment, observation, measurement, of the development of Mathematics in a form unknown to the Greeks. That spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs."[Robert Briffault, The Making of Humanity(1928)]
http://www.cyberistan.org/islamic/Introl1.html
Here's a quote from Paul Davies who also happens to be a physicist
" The numerical values that nature has assigned to the fundamental constants, such as the charge on the electron, the mass of the proton, and the Newtonian Gravitational constant, may be mysterious, but they are critically relevant to the structure of the universe that we perceive. As more and more physical systems from nuclei to galaxies have become better understood, scientists have begun to realize that many characteristics of these systems are remarkably sensitive to the precise value of the fundamental constants. Had nature opted for a slightly different set of numbers, the world would have been a very different place and WE WOULD NOT BE HERE TO SEE IT."
Known as the Anthropic principle in cosmology, this is not disputed by a single physicist, what is disputed is how to get around its logical conclusion of a God.
Another famous physicist Einstein was one of the founders of quantum mechanics, yet he disliked the randomness that lies at the heart of the theory. God does not, he famously said, play dice. However, quantum theory has survived a century of experimental tests, although it has yet to be reconciled with another of Einstein's great discoveries - the general theory of relativity.
Here is an interesting excerpt from an article on the evolution of modern hospitals in the Islamic world, written by François P. Retief and Louise Cilliers:
During the Golden Age of Islam the Muslim world was clearly more advanced than its Christian counterpart with regard to the magnificent hospitals which were built in various countries, institutions which eventually became the true forerunners of the modern teaching hospital.
Arab protesters demand democracy, but not secularism, says Michael Scheuer, former Bin Laden hunter at the CIA:
The Arab world’s unrest has brought forth gushing, rather adolescent analysis about what the region will look like a year or more hence. Americans have decided that these upheavals have everything to do with the advent of liberalism, secularism, and Westernization in the region and that Islamist militant groups like al-Qaeda have been sidelined by the historically inevitable triumph of democracy—a belief that sounds a bit like the old Marxist-Leninist claptrap about iron laws of history and communism’s inexorable triumph.
How has this judgment been reached? Primarily by disregarding facts, logic, and history, and instead relying on (a) the thin veneer of young, educated, pro-democracy, and English-speaking Muslims who can be found on Facebook and Twitter and (b) the employees of the BBC, CNN, and most other media networks, who have suspended genuine journalism in favor of cheerleading for secularism and democracy on the basis of a non-representative sample of English-speaking street demonstrators and users of social-networking sites. The West’s assessment of Arab unrest so far has been—to paraphrase Sam Spade’s comment about the Maltese Falcon—the stuff that dreams, not reality, are made of.
A year from now, we will find that most Arab Muslims have neither embraced nor installed what they have long regarded as an irreligious and even pagan ideology—secular democracy. They will have instead adhered even more closely to the faith that has graced, ordered, and regulated their lives for more than 1400 years, and which helped them endure the oppressive rule of Western-supported tyrants and kleptocrats.
This does not mean that fanatically religious regimes will dominate the region, but a seven-year Gallup survey of the Muslim world published in 2007 shows that a greater degree of Sharia law in governance is favored by young and old, moderates and militants, men and even women in most Muslim countries. While a façade of democracy may well appear in new regimes in places like Egypt and Tunisia, their governments will be heavily influenced by the military and by Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda. If for no other reason, the Islamist groups will have a powerful pull because they have strong organizational capabilities; wide allegiance among the highly educated in the military, hard sciences, engineering, religious faculties, and medicine; and a reservoir of patience for a two-steps-forward, one-step-back strategy that is beyond Western comprehension. We in the West too often forget, for example, that the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda draw from Muslim society’s best and brightest, not its dregs; that al-Qaeda has been waging its struggle for 25 years, the Muslim Brotherhood for nearly 85 years; and that Islam has been in the process of globalizing since the 7th century.
As new Arab regimes develop, Westerners also are likely to find that their own deep sense of superiority over devout Muslims—which is especially strong among the secular left, Christian evangelicals, and neoconservatives—is unwarranted. The nearly universal assumption in the West is that Islamic governance could not possibly satisfy the aspirations of Muslims for greater freedom and increased economic opportunity—this even though Iran has a more representative political system than that of any state in the region presided over by a Western-backed dictator. No regime run by the Muslim Brotherhood would look like Canada, but it would be significantly less oppressive than those run by the al-Sauds and Mubarak. This is not to say it would be similar to or more friendly toward the West—neither will be the case—but in terms of respecting and addressing basic human concerns they will be less monstrous.
Islamic Science Rediscovered
California Premiere
Limited Engagement. Opens Saturday September 3, 2011 at The Tech Museum in Silicon Valley, CA.
Did the Wright brothers soar in the sky first?
Was Leonardo da Vinci the first to describe "machines of the future"
* Centuries before Orville and Wilbur Wright took flight, Abbas ibn Farnas was soaring over the hilly Spanish countryside in a one-man glider - a thousand years before the famed Wright flight in North Carolina.
* Al-Jazari busied himself laying the foundations of modern engineering and writing the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices in 1206, where he described fifty mechanical devices along with instructions on how to build them, more than 200 years before Leonardo da Vinci became revered for his technological ingenuity.
Challenge your perspective.
Long overlooked or often misattributed, the remarkable contributions of Muslim scholars in science and technology have quietly floundered as no more than common footnotes of world history.
Designed to unearth the scientific know-how of an Islamic Golden Age that is all too strange and unfamiliar to Western culture, discover the innovation, science, and technology mastery of one of today's most misunderstood cultures in Islamic Science Rediscovered.
This global touring exhibition celebrates the contribution of Muslim scholars to science and technology during the Golden Age of the Islamic World (circa 8th to 18th centuries CE) and the influence of their discoveries and inventions on contemporary society.
Amazing ancient Islamic inventions are brought to life by more than 40 stations with interactive and sensory exhibits and videos to recreate the ingenuity. The exhibition covers the main fields of Islamic scientific endeavor including: architecture, arts, astronomy, engineering, exploration, fine and utilitarian technology, flight, mathematics, medicine, options and water control.
http://www.thetech.org/islamic_science_rediscovered/
In his book "On China", Henry Kissinger mentions the name of Zeng He, a 15th century Muslim admiral, who commanded the first Chinese Navy and made seven major expeditions under Emperor Yongle during Ming dynasty.
He was the great great great grandson of Sayyid Ajjal Shams al-Din Omar, a Persian who served in the administration of the Mongolian Empire and was appointed governor of Yunnan during the early Yuan Dynasty.
Kissinger says that the world history would have been very different if the Chinese emperors who succeeded Yongle had not decided to end the expeditions.
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